Gun control and the Supreme Court

American politics

Democracy in America

Gun control and the Supreme Court

Guns n' Robes

NO SURPRISE to find the Supreme Court striking down Chicago's handgun prohibition today. The ruling, by 5-4, precisely mirrors one in 2008 that struck down a ban on handgun ownership in Washington, DC. The same judges voted the same way, except that Barack Obama's appointee Sonia Sotomayor has taken the reliable-liberal slot of the retired David Souter. The majority opinion in today's ruling was written by Samuel Alito rather than Antonin Scalia, but otherwise, it was a re-run. The earlier DC decision had already found that a blanket ban on handguns runs up fair-and-square against the second amendment, so the only real issue was whether this principle binds states and cities as well as the federal government (Washington counts as federal territory). Since the court has repeatedly found that the rights set down in the first ten amendments do extend to lower levels of governance, this was again no surprise.

Which does cause one to reflect on the limits of Mr Obama's power. He controls the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, but until he is able to alter the balance of the court, there is only so far he can change America. It is even possible that the same 5-4 right-of-centre court might yet put a spoke in his health-reform wheel; more than 20 states are clubbing together to argue that requiring everyone to buy health insurance violates the constitution. The confirmation of Elena Kagan (her hearings also started today) will not change anything much either, since she is replacing another reliable liberal, in the shape of Justice John Paul Stevens. Since her political views are fairly opaque, her appointment might conceivably mark a slight shift to the right. Unless he wins his second term Mr Obama might well leave the court pretty much where he found it, in contrast to George Bush.

The consistency of the court's recent decisions on guns don't make them right however. You are not allowed to take your gun into the Mall of the Americas, the largest shopping centre in the world; nor into the Capitol; nor, thankfully, into many schools, churches or hospitals across the United States. You are not allowed to buy yourself a tactical nuke or various types of machine-gun. If you are a felon, you may have to get by without a gun altogether, though felons are not mentioned anywhere in the second amendment that I can see. The National Rifle Association in fact claims to have detected no fewer than 20,000 gun-control laws in force at federal, state and local level.

In other words, the right to bear arms has been comprehensively infringed for many years, and even the Roberts court does not seem interested in rolling back all of the pesky restrictions. In fact, Justice Alito explicitly said that his decision did not eliminate local jurisdictions' "ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values". Washington, DC has, since 2008, come up with a long list of registration and testing requirement for would-be gun owners. But you won't find a word about that in the second amendment.